eGames & Entertainment Expo 2007 – day 2 walkabout

The somewhat small showroom floor was populated by games, games, and more games (don’t forget about people, too). Unreleased titles available to play included Super Mario Galaxy, Gran Turismo 5 Prologue, Need for Speed Pro Street, Pursuit Force 2: Extreme Justice, God of War: Chains of Olympus and Assassin?s Creed. Recently released titles like Crysis, Guitar Hero III: Legends of Rock and Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare were also accessible to the public.

The main stage was occupied by keynote speakers from BioShock, Nintendo and Sony (which unfortunately I missed – though apparently I didn’t miss much – they were just demonstrations and whatnot).

Of course, the main attraction for me was a Penryn overclocking demonstration by Kamil Gurgen, Channel Platform Manager at Intel. He talked a lot about the move to Penryn and the 45nm process it adopts. He also briefly mentioned Nehalem and the move to 32nm. Nothing new was said though, he was covering already reported facts. Finally before burning some silicon, he pulled up a slide about the X48, and Intel’s DX48BT2 motherboard (which finally confirms the board’s name). Among the words “whoa” and “wow” that came from the audience, I still sat there waiting for some new info to arise other than the board’s 1600MHz FSB support.

The overclocking demo was no exception to the day’s theme of disappointment. Gurgen insisted the demonstration be done on air so “the people at home can replicate the results”. The system used the recently released Yorkfield-based QX9650, an Asus P5E3 Deluxe motherboard with an X38 chipset, what is believed to be 1GB of 1066MHz DDR3 memory, an 8800 Ultra and a 750w Silverstone PSU.

At stock (3.0GHz) the system completed Cinebench in 1m 50s. After bumping it up to 4.0Ghz (10×400), the system completed the test in 55s – almost a minute off. Moving to AquaMark, the system scored 230,469, and completed SuperPI 1MB in 11.312s. While the harsh reality of them not going any higher sunk in, it does go to show that these things can go way higher (as already seen) – especially since it was only 28C after the tests.

After Gurgen and the team left the stage, it was time for the Scorptec PC Build-Off. Consisting of five randomly chosen people who successfully completed the entry questionare (they were mostly questions regarding memory latencies, processor sockets etc), they were racing to build a PC the fastest. The components used were a Core 2 Quad Q6600, Gigabyte GA-P35-DS3P, OCZ 2GB PC-6400, XFX GeForce 8800GT 512Mb ?Alpha Dog Edition?, OCZ StealthXStream 600W, NZXT Hush Black Case, and among burners, HDD’s and peripherals, a Acer 22? Widescreen LCD.

The best part is, however, that the winner won the PC they built. The neatest PC also won the motherboard used. Among the running commentary from Matt and Yug from Australian Gamer, and the free stuff they were throwing out (potentially lethal too – the OCZ Rally flash drives hurt!) the winner took around 15m to complete the build and boot into Vista (pre-installed).

Tomorrow is the closing day (make that later today – time flies when you’re having fun), and the day’s events include a Guitar Hero 3 Idol competition, eGames Modding Comp, and the usual speakers from Nintendo and Sony.